Alden Bates' Weblog

Things I've noted while reinstalling Windows:

1. The process is far more painful than it should be. The biggest problem is, of course, every piece of hardware needing software drivers. Plug and Play never really did work...
2. More software needs to keep its settings somewhere other than the registry. I discovered that FireFox must do, because reinstalling Windows wiped out all the settings, extensions and bookmarks. This added extra hassle to an already annoying procedure. In contrast, software like Pegasus runs without me having to reinstall or reconfigure it. This Is Nice. (Of course, even FireFox's way is better than IE, where I have to download the browser all over again.)
3. Downloading 40 different critical updates is stupid. Microsoft should package them all as one, and update the critical update package every time they issue a new update. Update.

Am currently installing DirectX 9.0c so I can have some games working again. Apple's range of computers is becoming more and more attractive.

Addendum: Am now downloading MSN Messenger, which brings up two more good points: (a) 6.7MB is way too big for an instant message program. (b) "setup9x.exe" is a dumb name for an installer. In three weeks, how will I know what application it's for?

I have a bit of a problem with Paradise.net's transparent proxy server. Sometimes when I go to look at my web page, I don't get the current version. The reason is because the transparent proxy server is caching the page and not bothering to check if it has changed or not.

Grrr, say I.

I've been watching an anime series recently that my brother, Morgan, bought the box set of called "Chobits". Very very odd series.

My strategy for dealing with Yahoo's redirect problem seems to be working. Yahoo has dropped over one hundred redirected pages for www.tetrap.com from its index and is starting to index the proper URLs at nzdwfc.tetrap.com. This should hopefully reduce the number of unnecessary redirects and lessen server load.

It occurred that the reason BlogSpot is over-represented at BlogShares is because Blogger's free accounts ping weblogs.com by default, and that's where BS picks up new blogs. Add to this the fact that Google pimps Blogger via the Google Toolbar, and it's little wonder many of the listed blogs are BlogSpot blogs.

OTOH, LiveJournal is poorly represented (around 3000 listed) because only paid LJ accounts (accounting for about 4% of all LJ accounts) can ping weblogs.com, and the pinging is turned off by default (ISTR). LiveJournal doesn't do much in the way of working with the rest of the blogosphere.

There are even fewer Xangas (about a hundred or so), so I'm guessing Xanga doesn't ping weblogs.com at all.

I also today ran Ad-Aware for the first time in a while, and it reported that a cookie my site generates is a tracking cookie. I suspect this may be because it contains the user's email address. Pah.

When I switched on my PC today, the scanner software which starts up at boot time reported that the flatbed scanner (A Hewlett Packard ScanJet 5100C) wasn't responding. I took a look at the scanner, and the light on front was flashing.Odd, I thought. So I tried the usual measure of unplugging it for a moment and then plugging it back in.

At this point the scan head started moving backwards and forwards and playing classical music.

Yes, I'm serious. It created notes by varying the motor speed

Current theory is that it's a measure designed to make the user think he's gone mad. I googled for a bit but couldn't find any reference at all to an HP scanner playing classical music, so I'm not entirely sure why it was doing that.

Sadly it did not do it a second time when I attempted to replicate the procedure, though the scanner is working fine... All I can say is someone at Hewlett Packard has one hell of a sense of humour.

As Boing Boing reports, the Star Wars Trilogy DVDs contain a wee surprise for Xbox users - there's software on them which automatically updates the Xbox firmware without telling you. Which might spell trouble for people with modded Xboxes.

And you thought it was bad when it was just bored kids putting out viruses. :P

So I ran RegClean, a Microsoft product, to clean the Windows registry on my PC. It was so thorough that it also deleted a number of references to explorer.exe - resulting in My Computer and folders in general to lose the Open and Explore options on their context menu, and no longer open in explorer by default.

One would think that a piece of software purposely written by Microsoft for cleaning the registry would not do that sort of thing, wouldn't one?

But apparently one would be wrong. The odd thing is I'd run RegClean before with no problems.

It can already search for text within files on a disk, but it also needs to have an option to search in zip files... Though that would mean hunting down code to decode zip files. Hrm.

I did a quick Google for applications, which do this already, but they're not free. WinZip 9.0 doesn't appear to do it (Why not?! That would appear to be an invaluable tool!) and there isn't even an official add-on to do it.

I believe Window XP does that already, which might be why it's not in WinZip. But still, needs to be in Yikes, definitely.

Bruce Simpson writes a pretty good article on the current state of broadband in NZ. Telecom still had the market pretty much to itself and is making the most of it.

Ironically there was an item on TV1 news tonight about how Auckland University is offering streaming video of lectures over the internet so that students can attend lectures without leaving their home. In my experience, streaming video works very poorly over dial up. Are they suggesting students, many of whom have no other source of income, should borrow even more from the government in order to afford broadband?